13. Chase
Zak sat on the first row of benches in front of Chase as he untied her loaner skates. It had never taken anyone so long to remove boots before, but she didn’t seem to mind.
He told himself he was doing it to spare her fingers—it could take a while to get used to the unusual combination of warm skin and stiff joints—but really, it was an insignificant little way of confessing everything he wanted with her. Everything he wanted to give to her.
In all the months of little words and gestures he’d made to show her he wanted to be more than friends, maybe those same things would eventually show her he wanted to be more than unlabeled and experimental.
“So.” He took in the calm, happy expression on her breathless face as he ran his hands down her calves and gave a squeeze. “Did it help?”
She hid what he assumed was a smile behind the sleeve of her sweater, though he didn’t know why. He wanted that smile. He wanted all of them.
“Hitting stuff was a good call, but I think being with you is what helps most of all,” she told him, in the same brazen way she always shared small glimpses of emotion. “You make everything else not matter so much.”
He knew those things were difficult for her to say aloud, but she freed everything—from the poisonous barbs to the warm, honeyed promises. Meanwhile, he bit his tongue whenever they were splayed out on the ice, laughing at the ceiling, and all he could think of was how much he loved her for this.
He loved her for being the person he didn’t have to try around. For being brave and confident and challenging him at every turn, in ways he’d never known he needed. For injecting joy back into parts of his history he thought had been too blackened to salvage.
And he loved her for asking, even when she herself was hurting, “Did it help you?”
“Being with you always helps me,” he echoed her words. “Always.”
And especially now, he thought, looking out at the rink and, for the first time in two years, not seeing his blood staining the ice.
Now he saw the two of them—skin numbing through their clothing as they fell and talked. Fell and talked. Fell and kissed against the cold, hard ground.
“How do you feel now?” His knee knocked against the step as he stood, facing her. “About your dad?”
Her breath came out in a light puff. “I think I love him.”
Hearing her say those words about anyone at all drove a spear through his chest. Of hope. Of fear.
“I think that’s why it hurts,” she continued. “I don’t know how to forgive him. Don’t know if I want to. But for some ridiculous reason, I still fucking love him.”
Chase sat beside her. “There’s nothing ridiculous about that.”
“There is. He’s never been there for me.” Her eyes watered again, but this time there was an acceptance to her sadness, rather than the frantic, furious tears he’d seen streaming down her cheeks earlier. “Even though my mother was around, I kept clinging to my memories of him because they were the only good ones I had. Between the drugs and alcohol, and all the things I didn’t notice as a child, I love a version of him that never existed. And I put my imaginary dad on a pedestal. I bought his albums, I followed his career, and I told myself I wanted nothing to do with him. But all those years, I held out hope that he loved me, too.”
“Maybe he left because he did.” As difficult as it was to imagine, Chase had been there the night Dallas broke down. He knew nothing of what it was like to be an addict, but he did know how paralyzing the right medley of shame and depression could be. “It was the wrong thing to do, but love doesn’t always make people do the right thing.”
“No. It doesn’t.” Zak’s gaze shifted away as she nodded. “Thank you, Chase. For this. For everything. For being you. For sharing this with me. I know it wasn’t easy. It couldn’t have been.”
“Don’t thank me.”
He moved to hug her, but then she was moving, too. Swinging one leg over his lap and wrapping both arms around him. She rested her chin on his shoulder and held him with all her strength. Her thighs flexed against his hips.
His heart pounded through the fabric of his shirt.
Chase didn’t know when it first occurred to him that he was in love with her, or if there was a clear moment at all. Loving her had happened day by day. It was a truth that, on some level, he had known all along. Instead of something realized, it was something discovered.
He found small pieces of love for her every time they shared a glance, a touch. Every time her wit and sass bled through her voice.
He found larger pieces when they were on stage, when they were up late at night talking about the things that were important to them and unimportant to everyone else.
And the largest pieces came together whenever she played her guitar, in private, for nothing but the sheer delight of making music. Whenever she shared parts of herself that no one else knew or saw.
It was innate. It was all-consuming.
It was in the way he touched her, in the set of his jaw, in the way he squeezed his eyes shut as she pulled back and pressed her lips to his. He cradled her face in his palms and felt her body soften as he deepened the kiss.
Those three words were eating him alive. They were on the tip of his tongue. They were slipping out of his mouth before he realized he was telling her, “I lo—”
She twisted the neckline of his shirt in her fist and silenced him with a heartbreaking kiss.
He reasoned with himself that she might not have heard him, but she had still felt his lips brush hers as he had tried to speak. She might not have known what he was going to say, but she kissed him like she was desperate to keep him quiet. And whether she stopped him because she didn’t know how she felt, or she didn’t know how to say what she felt, the worst-case scenario knocked the confession from the forefront of his mind back down to the deepest recesses of it.
He reverted to cowardice once more. If there was a reality in which he loved someone as wholly as he loved Zak Parker and she didn’t love him back, he didn’t have the guts to face it right now.
“What are you doing?” he whispered as her lips moved to his neck.
“Proving to you that I’m still—what did you call it? ‘Rock’n’roll.’”
“You don’t need to prove anything to me.” His breath came in a short gasp as her warm tongue tracked up his tendon. “We don’t have to—”
“It’s never ‘have to’ with you, Chase.” Frigid air rushed in to dry the moisture from her mouth as she pulled back. Cupping his cheeks in her palms. “It’s always ‘want to.’ I always want you.”
“God, you have no idea.”
All he did was want. All of her. All the time.
She reached for the hem of his long-sleeved shirt and pulled it over his head, pressing her lips to the hollow at the base of his throat. Lowering herself to the ground and dotting kisses across his chest. “I love these freckles of yours.”
He caught her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “I love these lips of yours.”
And they curved into a smile as she touched her tongue to his fingertip. To the center of his sternum, where her soft bite grazed his skin. Goosebumps erupted over his entire upper body that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the way her eyes darkened as she palmed him over his jeans.
Her head dipped down. Kissing so close to his belt buckle, her teeth clicked against the metal.
Her thumbs trailed the inseam of his pants, from his knees to his inner thighs. She rolled up the left leg, the long johns he wore beneath, and pressed her lips to the place where his calf and shin, ankle and foot, used to connect. Now covered by scar tissue and fabric and silicone. Her eyes flickered to his. Earnest. Hesitant.
“Hey. What’s on your mind?” He sat forward, combing her hair back.
“I’m just glad you’re okay. I’m glad you’re here. That I had a second chance to know you.” She shook her head. “I would have gone my entire life never knowing what it was like. To feel like this.”
A selfish part of him hoped not, because having her forced him to believe there was no other option. There was no other person who could feel this right. He reached forward and felt her heartbeat beneath his palm. Where she carried her scars.
“I know,” he whispered, kissing her cheek. “I know.”
Chase took her hands in his and pulled her to her feet, guiding her back onto the bench as they swapped places.
He knelt before her and warmed her fingers between his palms. While he was used to the chill drifting from the rink, it was all new to her. The way sweat felt dry and frozen. The mental switch of forgetting how cold it was when active. Or occupied.
He raised the hem of her shirt by only an inch at a time, mapping her lower stomach with his lips. The higher he got, the closer he was to the strongest hotspot of that intoxicating perfume lingering on her skin. Bright, zesty oranges and vanilla cloyed between her breasts, seemingly stitched into the lacy black fabric of her bra. Her lips parted at the softest tug of his fingers beneath the clasp as he undid it.
And then her breasts were heavy in his hands. Soft beneath his lips—her sweater, soft against his cheeks—as he took one nipple into his mouth and felt it harden against his tongue. His thumb and index finger found the other.
For a while, he stayed there, basking in the way her skin warmed against his. The flush blooming on her cheeks. The soft, needy moans that sent blood rushing to his cock whenever he paused to kiss her collarbone instead. To brush her ribcage or her arms with the back of his knuckles.
“Chase?”
“Yeah?” he said against her breast.
She lightly touched his neck, her expression relaxed. Like something sweet was about to leave her lips, before she articulated, “Fuck me.”
“No, honey.” He ran his hands over her body. Glimpsing up at her as he lowered himself between her legs, where he drew nonsensical patterns over the skin exposed by the rips in her jeans. “Not yet. You’re going to let me take my time with you. Nice and easy. ‘Cause I bought this place out for the whole night and we have nowhere else to be.”
And because I love you. God, I fucking love you.
He tugged her jeans down over the swell of her ass and replaced the cover of the fabric with his hands. With his mouth. Kissing, tasting, sucking up her inner thighs to the edges of her panties as he watched her unwind.
Her hair was an untamed mess, her sweater loose around her shoulders and her bra loose beneath it.
He held her in place with one hand hooked behind her knee and one tracing her hip bone. Her hands, in turn, knotted into his hair as she tried to rush him faster. Tug him higher.
He spread her thighs wide. Arousal soaked through the center of the thin fabric, from black to blacker.
He swallowed, brushing his thumb over the wetness through the thin lace. “Need my mouth on you?”
“Chase,” she said again, impatiently this time.
“‘Cause I know I need it.”
He pushed aside the fabric and teased with one finger to the knuckle inside of her, then back out. Making the smallest strokes. Listening to the wet sounds of her pussy. Listening to her repeat his name like it was the only word she remembered.
Anticipation blazed in her eyes as he lowered his head. It coasted off her lips in a contented sigh, like the idea, alone, of him touching her was enough to shatter her into a million pieces.
His tongue touched her entrance first, mimicking those shallow movements. His fingertips made dents in her thighs as hers pulled on his hair.
And that…
The tangy, heady, addictive taste of her. The short breaths, those sexy noises she made. It was enough to make it physically painful to restrain. To keep from sucking on her clit until she came, and slamming her up against the side of the rink to fuck her until his name was no longer a whisper, but a scream. Echoing off the ice and between the rafters.
A groan escaped the back of his throat as she hooked her legs over his shoulders, her muscles tight as her hips moved against his mouth.
Unwilling to increase the speed for fear of losing control, he increased the intensity instead. He touched her hot, wet center once more. Stretching. The tight, wanting pressure around his fingers was enough for him to feel her around his cock.
“More,” she gritted out.
“More?” He sucked the softest part of her inner thigh between his teeth. “Gonna have to give me more than that.”
“More”—she gasped as he curled his fingers inside of her—“fuck. More everything.”
“More this?” He brought both hands to her chest, under the fabric of her sweater, to play with her nipples.
“Or more this?” He took another taste of her. Brushing his thumb over her clit until she sucked in a sharp breath.
“More this?” He ran his hands up the backs of her thighs until he reached her ass.
She trembled beneath him. Her dull fingernails bored into his shoulders as she dragged herself up and kissed him. Hard. Wet. Teeth scraping his bottom lip as the teasing finally broke her.
“You think I give a fuck, Chase? I want you to take everything.” She exhaled. “I want to feel all of you. Everywhere. Want your cock in my mouth, my pussy…” She glanced down, where his arms disappeared below her thighs. And she gave him a smile that would have made him come in his pants if he had one, singular ounce less of willpower. “My ass, if you want. I want you to use every part of me.”
The most primal recesses of his brain entirely fucking short-circuited. But in between those visions of doing exactly what she demanded—owning every part of her, fucking her in exactly that order until he’d watched every possible face she made when she came and knew every sound she made like the lyrics to his favorite song—he kept thinking back to the part of her he wanted most of all.
“You are ridiculously fucking hot, Zak.” His eyes drifted closed as he fell forward. Forehead resting against hers. Nose nudging the side of hers. “But stop trying to make it like that. Stop trying to make this just a fuck. Does this feel like just a fuck to you? Does it feel like I”m using you?”
Her lips brushed the corner of his cheekbone. “Never.”
His touch eased into something gentle. One hand, between her legs, resumed the steady rhythm that had been driving her crazy. The other teased her other tight hole while his imagination derailed entirely. He hadn’t ever explicitly thought of having her that way, but now her words would fuel every dirty, gluttonous dream he had about her.
Breaths heaved from her chest at the added sensation. If her squirming hips, her sharp moans at the barest pressure from his thumb, were any gauge of how much she liked it—now he definitely wanted her ass.
“I don’t want to use you, I want you here with me. I want it all.” He wasn’t sure if he was making any sense. Thoughts were just pouring out of his mouth. “I want you to feel everything with me. The way we are together, how amazing we are together. Do you feel that?”
She moaned something vaguely resembling, “I do,” but it dissolved into gibberish as he touched her increasingly rougher. Her sounds became louder. She shifted to kiss him again, but he kept his lips light on hers to hear every uncontrollable utterance before he moved back down to work her with his mouth.
“Wish I could touch you everywhere, angel,” he told her. “Grab your tits for me. I know how much you love that.”
She obeyed without question. Holding, cupping, pinching. “Like it better when you’re touching them,” she breathed, “sucking them, grabbing them while you fuck me. While I ride you.”
“You’re going to kill me.” He stole another taste while he stared up at her, rapt. Panting at the way she touched herself. The way she reacted to the strokes of his fingers, the press of his thumb.
And as he swirled his tongue over her clit, sucking in, she crumbled apart in his arms. Tremors ran in waves from her fingers, grasping his hair, to her ankles crossed over his back. Her expression was stupefied and dazed and blushed with heat.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.” He raised his body over hers to kiss her forehead.
One of her hands curled around the nape of his neck as she shook her head no. The other trailed down his chest to undo the buckle of his belt. The zipper of his pants. “I’m only thinking about you.”
She tugged the jeans, the long johns, and the boxer-briefs down his thighs in one pull. And her skin was against his. His cock aligned with her, throbbing against her warmth as he grabbed the back of one thigh and hooked it around his hips. Then the other, as he hauled her up.
Spun her around.
Pinned her flat against the plexiglass and grabbed her chin to crush his lips to hers.
He didn’t know how long they were there. Kissing between heavy breaths and soft moans. Her thick, toned thighs wrapped around him and her irresistible fucking body angling closer to his.
His hands roamed all over the curves that were permanently ingrained in his mind. Hers dragged pleasure like electric shocks all over his skin.
She reached between them, stroking him as her tongue stroked his.
He wondered if she knew the movements of her hips were driving him insane, or if her body sought friction on its own. Sought him. The same way he couldn’t be near her without battling the compulsion to touch her, hold her, kiss her. The same way Zak was so synonymous with love, sex, and happiness, that none of those things existed in his mind without her.
And when she guided the tip of his cock inside of her, he was helpless. Control: gone. He groaned into their kiss at the feeling of being wrapped in her. Their mouths joined, bodies joined, in a gradual, agonizing slide.
Those three words floated to the surface of his mind once more. No filter of clear-headedness and restraint to hold them back. He was so connected to her that he could think of nothing but the way he loved her.
The only thing that kept the confession from flying out of his mouth was how pathetic it would be for him to tell her for the first time in the middle of sex.
So, instead, he intertwined his fingers with hers. Held onto her hands so tight against the wall of the ice rink that he was worried he’d break her bones. And told her, “You have no idea how much you mean to me.”
One universal truth in place of another. She had seen him all along for who he truly was, at times when he didn’t even know himself. She had pushed him, supported him, and comforted him without sparing a thought, whenever he needed it. She had saved him from the slowest, quietest killer of all—misery.
Zak smiled against his mouth. That beautiful curve, her teeth nibbling on his bottom lip, turned the marrow of his bones to goo. “I was going to say the very same thing to you.”
Though he doubted she meant it the way he did.
He shook the thought from his scattered mind, loosening his grip on her hands to touch her elsewhere. His ice-cold fingers against her nipples, her clit, making her suck air through her teeth as he moved inside of her.
Slow. Steady. Trying not to lose his shit with her wiggling into him, making the hottest sounds he’d ever heard in his life, and taking his cock so deep, it forced curses from both of them at the same time.
Toward the entrance of the building, the air conditioning kicked on. The crimson numbers on the digital clock above the rental stand flashed in the half-lit arena, but they may as well have been hieroglyphs.
Her fingertips were digging into his back, his ass. Her teeth biting and sucking at his neck where he knew he’d find bruises tomorrow. And he’d never been so thankful for the fact that she always kept her nails cut as short as possible to play the guitar. Otherwise, he would’ve needed a skin graft when she was finished with him.
She treated fucking him the same way she treated everything that mattered to her. Passion so hot and consuming, it scorched him on contact.
“You need to let me catch my breath.” His chuckle turned into a strangled groan as her teeth grazed the shell of his ear.
“Out of shape, Payton?” She dragged a finger down the muscles of his abdomen. “Are these just for show, then?”
“I can keep you up here all night.” He caressed from her legs up to the dip of her waist. Up her spine, beneath her sweater. “I just can’t keep this up with how fucking tight you are. How sexy that body of yours is.”
“I like you breathing heavy,” she said lightly. Like it was a compliment instead of a tease. “I like knowing what I do to you.”
“You don’t have the first clue about all the things you do to me.”
He pushed her harder against the wall. Holding her by her hips as he fought to please her, to keep up with her demanding pace.
She warred with him. Grabbing his ass to drive him into her and telling him how sexy he was, how good he felt. How goodhe fucked her.
In other words, torturing him.
“Zak…”
The swivel of her hips—harder, deeper—threatened to tear him apart.
So good. Too good. Shit, shit, shit.
“Please,” she moaned.
Fuck him, he could not trust himself not to come with the next sound that came out of her mouth.
He lifted her. Dizzy. The rest of the room blacked out as he laid her down on the first row of bleachers, on top of his discarded coat. Laid his body over hers.
“Hold on to me.” He kissed her neck, at the crook of her jaw. “Hold me tight.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.” She sucked in a gasp and wrapped her arms around his waist. Her legs tangled with his as she moved with him, taking him deep again. Deeper still, until he was completely encircled by every part of her. “I never want to let go of you.”
“Don’t.”
It was the last intelligible word he could muster before sharp breaths, unrestrained moans, and the whisper of her skin against the fabric took over his senses.
At the back of her head, one of his hands tightened in her hair. The other roamed her body—every place he hadn’t been able to reach with his head between her legs.
Chase let himself fall.
He lost track of that slow, melting push and pull long before the hot sounds of her pleasure blurred together. Before her already tight muscles contracted around his cock, her grip locking him in place as if he would dare move when she was coming all over him. Panting his name. Forcing him to kiss her, messy and wet and imperfect, like she was going to scream if she didn’t do something else with her mouth.
Her calves slid up to his hips, where she bore down. Grinding into him until he finally came apart, too. Out of breath from kissing her, from crushing his body to hers. From the blindingly intense clarity with which he loved her, and with which it terrified him.
They stayed that way until he began to worry whether she could breathe underneath his body weight. He got up and managed to move a few feet before collapsing again on her lower stomach. Kissing the crease of her thigh as they lay there. Spent.
She looked like some erotic fantasy he’d had years ago and still hadn’t been able to shake no matter how many times he touched her. Her cheeks and chest were covered in a beautiful pink blush. His cum dripped down her leg.
And her eyes were glassy again, as she stared up at the ceiling.
“Did I hurt you?” he spoke softly.
“Not at all.” Her voice came out hoarse. “It’s just hard. Being reminded of how much I need you.”
Which told him maybe she did feel the same as him. But while he was waiting for everything to come together, she was still waiting for everything to fall apart.